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Our fediverse conversations are gonna have the context they have been missing! (community.nodebb.org)

submitted 1 month ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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This past June, I put together a write-up about two major approaches to backfilling conversations. The ability to properly backfill conversations means we will be able to make major inroads toward solving the feeling that the fediverse is quiet.

I, alongside several other members of the SWICG Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force (ForumWG) have been working toward building implementor support for Conversational Contexts — the ability to explicitly classify a set of objects as belonging to a conversation, whether that be a topic, reply tree, or similar.

I am happy to report that we have made some wonderful inroads this past few months!

jesseplusplus@mastodon.social has been working closely with the Mastodon team to allow software to backfill from Mastodon — this pull request has now been approved!

I have been working with both nutomic@lemmy.ml and rimu@piefed.social to allow software to backfill from Lemmy and Piefed, respectively. (Lemmy PR, Piefed issue)

This marks a major milestone in the adoption of conversational contexts. With Mastodon on board backfill will be possible with the majority of the microblogiverse. With Lemmy and Piefed on board, backfill will be possible with the majority of the threadiverse.

Remember that pfefferle@mastodon.social was an early adopter of conversational contexts, and we have been able to backfill from WordPress blogs for quite awhile now (so that's the blogiverse too)

I for one, am eagerly awaiting the next version of all of these softwares!!

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[-] julian@activitypub.space 4 points 1 month ago

Those are all very good questions, and exactly the sort of things that would be discussed at the ForumWG.

Backfill is just one of the things (the main thing, currently) we touch on, but one of the more important ones, because the potential to ensure you have the entire conversation is important from a data completeness standpoint.

The thing to remember is that there's no one "owner" of a conversation. Right now it's a pretty loose association... individual posts and notes can declare that they are part of a context, even if that isn't the case. This beats the current system where there is no association at all.

The difference here is that as a consumer of backfill, I can actually go to the context and verify this. We can extend this later on with context ownership, and defer responsibilities like moderation, interaction policies, forking/merging, etc.

The long view of this is we intend to increasingly solidify the association between context and object over time.